Miguel Cabrera Wins American League MVP

ENLARGE

Detroit Tigers' Miguel Cabrera was named American League MVP on Thursday.
Associated Press

By

Brian Costa

Updated Nov. 16, 2012 11:40 a.m. ET

At long last, one of the most polarizing award races in baseball history is over. Detroit Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera was named American League MVP on Thursday, beating runner-up Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels. Cabrera received 22 of 28 possible first-place votes from the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Miguel Cabrera has a Most Valuable Player award to go with his Triple Crown, and Buster Posey has an MVP prize to put alongside his second World Series ring. The pair won baseball's top individual honors Thursday by large margins. Photo: REUTERS.

If only the debate ended there.

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The question of which one of those two was more deserving of the award has been dissected and argued for months – and the hand wringing from Trout backers will begin anew now.

Both players had strong cases for the award. Cabrera became baseball's first Triple Crown winner since 1967, leading the league in batting average (.330), home runs (44) and RBI (139). He also led the league in on-base plus slugging percentage (.999) and weighted on-base average (.417), both of which are now understood to be far more telling measures of offensive production than batting average and RBI.

Trout, the AL Rookie of the Year, was comparable to Cabrera in most offensive categories. And his OPS+, which adjusts OPS to account for different ballpark factors and puts it on a scale relative to the league average, was actually higher than Cabrera's (171 to 165). But the other aspects of Trout's game, namely base running and defense, were vastly superior than Cabrera's.

That is why Trout's wins above replacement, which attempts to quantify a player's total value in terms of marginal wins added, was so much higher than Cabrera's. Under the Fangraphs version of the statistic, Trout led 10 to 7.1. The Baseball-Reference.com version had Trout ahead 10.7 to 6.9.

In theory, this should have made for a nice little discussion about what makes a player more valuable than another. The Baseball Writers Association of America leaves plenty of room for subjectivity on its ballot instructions, so the definition of "most valuable" is open to interpretation.

But that is not what happened at all. The debate became about so much more than the players and their accomplishments, to the point where Cabrera and Trout became a backdrop to a larger spectacle.

It became about old school versus new school, stats versus tradition, and it became hijacked by extremists on both sides. There was no room for nuance. You were in one camp or the other. Either you were an idiotic, Triple Crown-loving Luddite or WAR-obsessed stat geek with no common sense.

The reality is this race was not about the merits of WAR – and it shouldn't have been about the significance of the Triple Crown. WAR was just an indicator of what even the crustiest old writer could see with his eyes: that Trout was a comparable hitter and a far better base runner and fielder.

The Triple Crown just highlighted how Cabrera was indisputably the more fearsome hitter. And there were other rational arguments to be made about the value of Cabrera's leadership (he moved to third base to make room for Prince Fielder at first) and the fact that he played in 22 more games than Trout.

But it's over now. Really. Everyone step away from the screen and exhale. No matter the result, your side will always know this: Your side was right.

(Full disclosure: I didn't have an MVP vote, but if I did, I'd have picked Trout without hesitation.)

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Another little bit of news: There was actually another league this year, and they also had an MVP. The National League award went to San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey, who received 27 of 32 possible first-place votes.

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